Or than King Edward had cumid litill speid
In that mater, thairof haif ye no dreid.
Quhairfor the Bruce hes done all that he mycht
That da in feild for to reskew his rycht
Agane King Johne, and for na either thing
And for no plesour of the Inglis king.

TWISTING THE BOWSTRING.

THE green bowstring—that wholesome
ameliorator of Turkish despotism—was secretly
twisting for Abdut-Medjid that very August
morning when in the Royal Addlehead (Austrian
Lloyd's) steamer I clove through the white woolly
fog that filled the Bosphorus, and swept down
into the Golden Horn. The plot, too, unseen
to me, was thickening like that fog.

But for a dark cypress pinnacle or two, and
here and there something that looked like a gilt
teacup turned bottom upwards, and which I
supposed not irrationally to be the dome of a
mosque, and but for here and there, I say, the
needle-pointed spire of a minaret crowned by a
crescent, that seething city might have very well
passed for sable London, and Galata might have
been the Tower Wharf on a November morning.
It was very cool and steamy, and my unromantic
mind was occupied with but one thought, and
that thought was hot coffee. I would, I vow,
at that selfish and material moment, have given
a whole haremful of dove-eyed Circassians for
a potful of smoking coffee: so jaded, sleepy,
befogged, and tired was I. I had come to see
the city of the Sultan, and I found myself at a
muggy place that looked like St. Katharine's
Docks in a November fog. And this is what
you call travelling!

We had been up romantically early, by
preconceived poetical plan (for at poetical places
every one likes to be poetical)—three in the
morning I think it was—to see the Royal Addlehead
enter the Bosphorus. A ghastly réveil it
was, rising hurriedly by lamplight, looking
hopelessly through the still opaque porthole, and
seeing a grey sea racing by with ferocious speed,
and with a slight effervescence of rage on its
clenched lips—rising by lamplight (Lord help us!),
staggering into one another's trousers, and crawling
hopelessly up-stairs for the delightful view,
looking like wretches saved from a wreck, and
who had just heard a sail was in sight, yet were
too broken down by hunger and misery to cheer
even at that. It was delightful indeed; the
demon who presides over the Home Department
of Sham (a most onerous and important post of
the Satanic Dis-united Kingdom) must have got
up very early too, that morning, and been
specially delighted at our empty, ridiculous
raptures at what would have been "exquisite"
if a great brewer's-vat smoking white fog had
not swallowed it all up and left us nothing, not
even our great Consul's palace—not even a
glimpse of the English burial-ground on the cliff
at Scutari.

And here let me leave the deck and go
below again, to dilate with bilious spleen on the
melancholy joys of early rising, and the doleful
penitential pleasures of travellers' ante-daybreaks.
The chilly, sickly half-hour before the
red blood flows back into the corpse cheek of dead
Day, and the Lazarus "morn," led by a sunbeam,
emerges radiant and divine from the burial tomb
of night. Waking by lamplight—the light you
seem to have shut your tired, bored eyes upon
but half an hour ago—how you grope for the
never-to-be-found watch—how you linger in a
stupid, imbecile, irresolute way, watching your
watch's hands chase each other over your dial—
the tall quick brother dodging and running round
his slow fat brother, till by-and-by, like pulling
out a tooth, drowsy and unrefreshed, you throw off
the clothes suddenly, and put one shrinking foot
out into the cold-water air, just as if you were
bathing, and it was a little too late in the season.
No one turned out yet; steward—a wily Greek—
asleep, with his head on a pile of camp-stools, and
a cigarette, long since gone out, clipped in his dirty
fingers. Every curtain drawn across the little
bins and dog-kennels of beds. One alone (that
vivacious little clerk from a silk house in Smyrna,
who calls himself a Macedonian, and prides
limself on being a compatriot of Alexander
the Great) has in the contortions of sleep wound
himself round his curtain, so that he looks like
a corpse decently swathed and bandaged for sea
burial. The clothes of everybody hang still on
the outside pegs, or repose on the horsehair
cushions of the divan seat beneath. Yes, the
young Turkish priest has taken off his neat
green turban, so trimly and dandily twisted; his
sash and long black robe, and his neat boots and
outside goloshes lie there upon the floor, waiting
for him. The Bohemian baker, and the learned
Russian professor, Alexis Strongenoff, snore in
perfect time and tune, and there, by the Bohemian
baker's bed, is that wonderful green conical
hat with the broad green ribbon and steel buckle,
which has been, during our passage down the
Danube and across the treacherous Black Sea,
the wonder and delight of many. There, too, on
peg No. 4, right-hand side, is the curious flat,
broad, white cap of the Russian Colonel Karkoff,
deadly player at pool, and a very gallant
soldier, though he does wear what resembles a
large white unbaked muffin on his astute head.

Need I detail any more the horrors of early
rising on board the Royal Addlehead—how,
begirt with snores and disturbed grumbles, I
groped about, looking for water and finding
none? Shall I relate how, in the struggling,
curdled daylight, I found myself washing my
face with sour wine, and rinsing my mouth
vith cognac—how, at last, tired and seedy, I
crept up the brass-bound stairs to be greeted
with a rolling swill from a German sailor's
wash-bucket—and how, finally, my heroic and
self-denying exertions were crowned by my
having a fine view of what a Turkish soldier said
was the shore of the Bosphorus?

Only last night, waltzing on the wharf at
Galatz to the music of an Austrian bird-organ,
and now—the wobegone crew we were,
on this Stygian shore!—clinging to ropes,
sitting on green seats, watching stamped and